With Loggly, XAPPmedia: • Standardizes its diagnostic approach with the combination of Docker and Loggly • Accelerates resolution of software and non-software issues • Employs proactive alerting to prevent issues from affecting the business

1. Loggly and Docker Deliver Powerful
Monitoring for XAPPmedia
Profile
Log management:
A microservices must-have
Docker makes scattershot
SSH’ing obsolete
Highlights
XAPPmedia is the leader in
interactive audio advertising
and is the first company to
Give Consumers a Voice™
allowing instant connections
with brands through mobile
audio apps.
XAPP ads enable customers to respond instantly
with just their voice.
Like many cloud-based businesses, XAPPmedia
understood the value of centralizing its log data to
simplify troubleshooting. As it migrated its whole
environment to Docker, Loggly evolved into the
heart of how the company monitors its service and
diagnoses issues.
With the move to Docker, John Kelvie, chief
technology officer at XAPPmedia, made the
decision to lock down all of the machines in its
• Standardizes its diagnostic
approach with the
combination of Docker and
Loggly
• Accelerates resolution of
software and non-software
issues
• Employs proactive alerting
to prevent issues from
affecting the business
CASE STUDY
®

2. Why Loggly?
Solution
Log data enables sanity check on
new microservices deployments
cluster, which runs on the Amazon Elastic Container Service. “We
went from having several machines running certain applications
to a cluster running all of our containers,” Kelvie explains.
“Manual log access for any particular container is impractical
because you don’t know where it’s running in the cluster, and
it creates security risks.” While XAPPmedia had used Loggly
fairly extensively before the Docker migration, the team’s use
increased dramatically in the microservices world.
XAPPmedia had selected Loggly in 2014 after a brief experience
with Splunk Storm. “At first I was skeptical that log management
could scale in the cloud, but Loggly won me over,” Kelvie reports.
“I liked the pricing. I liked the front end. I liked the fact that I
CASE STUDY
XAPPmedia initially used Loggly to manage its application logs,
which contained diagnostics it had instrumented into its code.
Now, the company uses Loggly for all of its logging. Everything
that comes out of a container, whether through stdout or
stderr, gets sent to Loggly via rsyslog. The trickiest part of
the implementation was devising an approach to tagging each
log event with the container out of which it came, tags for the
service it came from, as well as a unique instance ID. According
to Kelvie, “Once we solved that, it worked beautifully! We had
just vastly improved our diagnostic capability.”
— John Kelvie, Chief Technology Officer, XAPPmedia
“Better log management wasn’t something I initially
thought of as a benefit of switching to Docker. But the
combination of Docker and Loggly is very powerful.”
could pull out my phone at a restaurant and debug an issue right
then and there.”
For the team at XAPPmedia, Loggly is the first destination after
every new release. With the top-level view provided in Loggly
Dynamic Field Explorer™, Kelvie and his developers can ensure

3. Proactive monitoring
via Loggly alerts
Quicker
troubleshooting keeps
revenue on track
Loggly and Docker
together: Standardized
diagnosticsXAPPmedia has set up a number of alerts
so that the team knows immediately
when something is not working correctly.
These alerts fall into two general
categories:
When troubleshooting an issue, the
team has comprehensive error and
exception data available. It also can trace
As XAPPmedia has fully embraced
microservices, its infrastructure has
achieved a level of uniformity that
didn’t exist before, allowing the team to
CASE STUDY
“We now have an interface
through which we can jump in and
see what’s happening with our
application and with any instance
of it—at any time, wherever we
are.”
• Exceptions get routed to developers for
debugging.
• Non-software issues get routed to the
ad operations team. For example, if the
service is receiving multiple requests
for an ad that doesn’t exist, the
operations team might need to work
with a customer or replace creative.
In addition to email notifications,
XAPPmedia sends some alerts to Slack
channels, which are set up as a Loggly
endpoint. It complements Loggly with
other metrics and monitoring tools such
as Datadog.
that the new services started and that
they are not generating any errors.
transactions in cases where data didn’t
get processed correctly, even when no
exceptions occurred. Finally, XAPPmedia
can sculpt certain payloads to analyze
all requests and responses, for example
when it releases a new API or onboards
a customer. “Everyday tasks that used to
take as long as an hour now take minutes
or seconds—this is valuable time that
we get back. And it helps us say ‘in flow.’
The penalty to switch contexts and look
at logs when they are all neatly available
in Loggly is much, much lower than when
we were doing the SSH/tail two-step,”
Kelvie says.
— John Kelvie, Chief Technology Officer,
XAPPmedia

4. CASE STUDY
leverage Loggly to a greater extent. “When we put Loggly
together with Docker, we standardized and brought best
practices to all of our diagnostics in a way that I have
never before been able to achieve in my 15 plus years as
a CTO,” Kelvie says. “Now, I tell developers not to worry
about logging. Everything will get taken care of, tagged
to the app and instance, and be easily accessed through
Loggly. It’s a huge payoff.”
XAPPmedia has migrated its entire
environment to a microservices architecture
running on Docker.
About Loggly
Loggly is the world’s most popular cloud-based, enterprise-
class log management service, serving more than 10,000
customers including one-third of the Fortune 500. The Loggly
service integrates into the engineering processes of teams
employing continuous deployment and DevOps practices to
reduce MTTR, improve service quality, accelerate innovation,
and make better use of valuable development resources. We
offer an alternative to traditional, search-based log analysis
by structuring and summarizing your log data before you ask
it to. With Loggly, your logs reveal what matters through real-
time metrics and dashboards. Founded in 2009 and based
in San Francisco, the company is backed by True Ventures,
Matrix Partners, Cisco, Trinity Ventures, Harmony Partners,
Data Collective Venture Capital, and others. Loggly is an
AWS Advanced Technology Partner and a Docker Ecosystem
Technology Partner. Visit us at www.loggly.com or follow
@loggly on Twitter.
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